Sophie didn’t know if she should pull away from the risk of his mood souring or try to comfort him. Before she could do anything, Micah said, “Last time steppin’ on my toes, Dante, yeah? Next time you meet me in a circle.” Sophie saw Micah use the rear-view mirror to look at his brother, who flinched and looked down.
“It’s done now, but Dante is right. Ranalf had something to do with that ring. We have a history. He’s the younger brother of my best friend; their parents were second parents to me. You understand? Shifter family is tight. Very tight. There’s conflict and gossip and people up in all your shit, but we settle it in a circle, and we don’t hang onto crap. First thing you got to know is that Ranalf hung onto all the crap.”
“Stuck to him like shit,” Dante put in.
“I think I understand,” Sophie said.
Micah said, “Next thing you need to know is that Ranalf was a runt. Youngest, smallest, and fucking weird. Hit his head as a baby and didn’t heal right. No joke. He was off after that. Smelled off. No one cared if he was underfoot or followed us everywhere. That’s what pups do. But it was the jealousy. Always with the fucking jealousy. That shit didn’t get better either. He grew out of being a runt, got a better reputation, got strong, made a little pack that had the same kind of weird. Then met a priestess of the Morghanna.”
Micah’s voice lowered. Sophie could feel the deep, bitter resentment he felt when he said that. “That bitch showed him how to seduce females, sway them. Enchant them? I don’t know what she taught him, or what bargain they had, but soon half the women in all our villages wanted him to father their child.”
“None of the women saw what men saw. None of them.Ninguna de ellas,” Jumper said, mixing his Spanish and English.
Micah agreed. “Not a fucking one. So my man Alder, Ranalf’s older brother, goes to talk to Ranalf. Figure out what the hell is going on. Ranalf was getting big in his britches with all the women, upsetting other shifters, building a real pack instead of just a group of misfits. All without a single fucking challenge, and it was going to cause trouble. Alder didn’t come back from that conversation.”
Sophie saw Micah’s jaw clench, teeth grinding as he watched the road. Every word escalated the tension in his body. “We didn’t know. We were so clueless. The bitch goddess, she can lie to me, to us. That ain’t fucking right, but there it is. She can lie, and we can’t smell it, can’t see it—deaf, dumb, and smacked blind. She can lie, her priestesses can lie, and we had no idea.”
He pounded the steering wheel. Sophie couldn’t help herself. She scooted close to him, offering what comfort she could. He covered her thigh with his hand and pulled her in, wrapping her around the stick of the gas guzzler and as close as he could get her. “We had nothing to do with the Morghanna before that. She isn’t our goddess. There were red-bloods outside the forests we ruled. She was theirs, though who knows why.”
“I found Alder in the Morghanna’s courts, bloody and nearly fucked to death, if you can imagine. I begged her to let me help him. She said yes, if I replaced him. I took him home. He didn’t last a night and in his last fucking breath told me it wasn’t Ranalf’s fault; the bitch was a deceiver, and I shouldn’t go through with the agreement I’d made,” Micah continued.
There was a noise from the back. Sophie turned around to see Dante’s eyes close as he banged his head back against the seat behind him, as if it made him as angry and frustrated as it did Micah to remember.
Micah said, “But I couldn’t lie, couldn’t break my word. What kind of man does that limp-dick crap? I don’t. I went.”
“And it was our father who bargained for Micah and replaced him. Followed Micah there. But bitch played with time, folded it somehow. I dragged Micah out, half alive, but our father didn’t come back. She used him up.t,” Dante remembered miserably.
“We broke with all the red-blood around our villages. It made us enemies after centuries of peace. And we pushed them over the mountains, away from our forest. Told them to take their priestess, their goddesses, and all the rest with them. We wouldn’t have shit to do with them anymore.”
Jumper leaned forward, propping his elbows on the seat back. “But Ranalf did something to the women. And he made trade agreements with the red-bloods he didn’t want to break. Themanda de lobossplit. A lot of fuckin women went with Ranalf. They just fucking went.”
“I gave my word to his brother not to harm or blame Ranalf, he was simple after all, and it was a binding last wish. After we started making a place here, our numbers were low. Ranalf was posturing, starting shit, but everyone who had any sense was tired of death. Avó was tired of death. Plus, who wants to be alpha of any fucking lot that would choose that piece of shit as a leader? Okay? The rest, you know. Ranalf making a play.”
Jumper’s voice was low and angry when he said, “Ranalf was always making a play.”
Micah grunted in agreement.“Should have strangled him as a pup.”
Sophie let the story sink in, watching blindly as the streets outside the cab of the car changed. They drove under the broken rebar and pillars of the eyeninety past the low-hanging fog of the barrens, into a swath of land that used to be businesses and strip malls. Now it was all ghosts and memories. Finally, intact buildings from the late nineteenth century appeared, signs of life and habitation in neighborhoods of mixed dwellings. The streetlights worked here, sidewalks and roads clear and repaired. The closer to Hyde, the more habitable and ordered the world became.
There were taller, twenty-first-century buildings in the north area of Old City, like the one where the gargoyles lived. Most of them were still standing, but only a few were in good condition. There were strange pockets of disrupted time. Buildings returned from a hundred years ago, and buildings from the future or other places, like the bogach and the barrens, appeared in the place of what had been before. Things that didn’t belong in any North American city.
Her home in Hyde was the most normal slice of the rebuilt past in the entire city. Everything she found in the library said that Hyde twenty years ago was one of the finest and most distinguished areas for miles. Wealthy, successful people once lived there. Now the vampir ruled all of it.
Hyde’s masters loved the old fancy architecture. Claiming any building with tiled halls and high ceilings chilly enough to blow their own arctic winds. They kept the gardens and parks of the past, reconstructing them from old photos, in agreement with the local sorcerers and witches. Though the vampir didn’t care for nature, the sorcerers did, because even death magic had to bargain with nature and the cycle of life.
The vampir restoration and maintenance of the red-blood’s past was an intentional insult to everyone living as servants or slaves in their stables.
Micah parked in front of Cyril’s brood house. The vampir clustered together in Hyde, even enemies, all choosing to live in buildings once dedicated to learning and growth. They transformed it into a warren for their people, blacking out windows to remove the annoyance of the sun.
The shifters running with them surrounded the car as they parked. Two stayed outside while the others protectively lined up beside them as they entered the building.
The vampir loved protocols and traditions. Various unseelie fae littered the hallways like statues. Inside, two vampir wearing silver-threaded vests bowed to them, wordlessly motioning the shifter group to follow. They were led into court, a room acting much like a medieval hall, with space easily converted to tables for gatherings and a fancy metal chair for the archon raised up on a platform so that he could survey the room with ease.
The vampir court lined the room, and servants stood in groups, or pools, as the vampir called them, fully enthralled, waiting blankly for their next instructions. Every step closer they got to the archon, the colder the room became.
Pale, with longer than normal limbs and hairless, humanoid faces, Cyril’s brood court wore clothing and jewelry taken from the most expensive red-blood stores and homes. They embraced the fashions of pre-Apocalypse Day with mocking glee. Altered to fit the disjointed bodies of not-human creatures, the impractically dressed vampir taunted the disempowered humanity by claiming wealth no one could use.
What drew Sophie’s immediate attention was the scaffolding set up in front of Cyril’s chair. The archon’s four sorcerer mages stood at each corner of a metal frame. Suspended by ropes in the center was a female vampir, still alive, a victim caught in the web of pain. Sophie had seen that scaffolding before—it did not have good memories.
